Agreed. I always enjoyed the direction that Civilization IV had taken there from Civ3, giving a cost to expansion while not hard blocking it. It made it so that you could gradually overcome it. It seems indeed that Realism Invictus has taken that a logical and natural step further. Civilization IV is probably my favourite game and I suspect that this will become my favourite mod. Although I never got around to playing the highly praised 'Fall from Heaven' and I should really try that. I dislike the newer versions of Civilization because the AI can absolutely not handle 1UPT.
Oh, I made a mistake there. Newly founded cities will have a happy cap of 3 population in the ancient era. (I must have been thinking of new cities in classical when I wrote that.) That's actually the same for monarch and emperor, too (and even immortal, though it gets knocked down by 1 for titan and deity).
You get 4 happiness "out of the box," but bear in mind that your default government civic gives you 1 unhappiness, as well as the starting population unit, so until you improve this, you'll be capped out at pop 3 (and 4 for your capital). Tribal union is strictly a malus civic, and timing anarchy is the only incentive you have to hold onto it once either autocracy (which retains the same unhappiness penalty, but flips your city maintenance penalty into a corresponding bonus among some other nice perks) or confederation become available.
But, as my mistaken train of thought demonstrates, this can become a significant problem if you hit classical (which, all era changes, increases unhappiness and unhealthiness per city by +1), in which case new and completely undeveloped cities will have a punishing cap of only 2 population until you improve this. The eras all make the passive caps lower, but also introduce new ways to actively overcome them.
Ah, ok, then we are on the same page. And you are right that there is an additional unhappiness from the civic, effectively lowering your happiness one further at the start of the game. Going into the classical age is a thing that you need to plan well so that you can quickly overcome the additional unhappiness. I read about it, and I will make sure to take it into account when playing. Thanks.
Yes, it does feel quite natural and correct to me. As I mentioned above, each new era provides the means of increasing
and
beyond their individually-contributed penalty, but at different phases of the game the balance certainly swings more one way or the other. For instance, late medieval and early industrial place
at much more palpably felt premium than
in my experience, while you're raking in the general abundance of food and happiness from religion and your early manufactured goods (alcohol and glassware) put the weight much more on that leg of the stool, and in industrial, building factories and power plants is still much more of a net positive from the enormous boon to
(and that fact that power is a literal necessity for your late game buildings) but still results in a lot of
. Once you build the modern medical projects, though (which actually start in the renaissance, and get progressively better and better, though are enormously expensive) and you've industrialized and modernized your power plants from coal, you really feel like your civilization has conquered nature and is free to have its population explode, much as it has in real life during the timeframe of living memory. That sense of weightiness and scale through a precarious and varied journey of fighting both of these caps to different degrees and in different forms throughout the game is quite satisfying to a sense of progress and accomplishment.
That was a bit the impression that I got from going through the manual and the Civilopedia. But since I had not yet played it, I didn't realise that the progress was first in happiness, then in health. I did see that the focus shifted sharply to the craftsman, but it was also mentioned in the manual. You really know how to sell the benefits of the mod, by the way!
The smaller map suggestion had more to do with playing a "tutorial run" initially before really attempting to play seriously, but of course you do what you feel would be most enjoyable. It was already mentioned above, but be forewarned that the pace of RI is much slower than the base game. I play on standard maps and the default "Realistic" speed at a fairly steady pace and a typical game for me takes anywhere from 30-60 hours to complete. The larger maps will have substantially longer turn resolutions mid-game onward, which is likely to extend that number further (and all the more so if you deliberately play slowly).
Also, it is way harder at the same nominal difficulty level. If you played deity in the base game, I'm definitely not your peer in terms of this, but as a stable monarch player of the base game when I first started playing the mod, RI's monarch was atrociously hard in comparison and it took quite a while to get comfortable at this level, as I am now. I would probably suggest starting there, yourself, while you learn to read the game and its balance. Besides that, bear in mind, too, that Karadoc's AI got installed, so the viciousness and toughness of your opponents will be a lot steeper.
I used to play CivIV BTS at epic speed, so I do like it a bit slower. Although this is maybe closer to marathon speed. It does shift things around a bit where units can move a lot more compared to how quickly you can produce them. That's one element that doesn't scale.
This mod doesn't have so many percentage bonuses from buildings and that is an element that the AI is usually not using as well as the human player: stacking percentage bonuses on top of great base output. But the AI has also been improved a lot by a few great modders. I recall seeing a naval invasion the first time that Better AI was first available as a mod. It must have improved further in the last couple of years that I didn't play. It is great fun that the AI can play this arguably more complicated version of Civilization to a high level.
Funnily enough, size 40 actually is fairly conservative if you were really trying to maximize this. Playing with an agrarian leader will give you +1
on late game mechanized farms, and you can build multiple canned food factories (each adding +2
of their own (which, unlike worked farms, don't have a "tax" from the citizen working them, of course, so these boost growth quite a bit), and this in conjunction with all of the late-game food explosion stuff like agronomy stations, agricultural machine depots, and industrial shipyards (which basically make every water tile a food bonus) would make settling in a particularly blessed slice of the earth net you ridiculously high populations if you are deliberately going for this. (In my first "serious" game of RI that I won, admittedly on Prince, I maxed a city out at size 52, I believe.)
I know that resources aren't consumed by creating their derivative processed goods. But it was not clear to me whether that meant that you could build the processing factories everywhere, or whether you are limited to a number of processing factories equal to the number of base goods that you have and you thus have to choose where to build them. For instance, in the base game, one resource of iron allows you to build an unlimited number of swordsmen, but you can still only trade it away once and then you can't build swordsmen any more. So, it is both singular and infinite in nature.
These factories are also very expensive, so maybe you don't value the +2 food highly enough compare to the hammer input. You of course want at least one of them purely for the health bonus.
Interesting question, too. The relative worth of
as an output of
massively outcompetes the yields from other improvements by the late game, once you've industrialized, so a typical mature late game city should be able to net several hundred units of production by working mechanized farms and running craftsmen. The beauty of this as well is that, as a short-term situation may dictate, there's no "sunk cost" in switching from craftsmen to whatever other specialists you might need, so you can switch to merchants or spies or scientists, etc., whenever you may need (and, craftsmen provide no great people points, unlike these others, if you need a great person, so being able to switch full-scale temporarily is beneficial). In general, though, for the great majority of the game's timeline, cottages and farms are in a nice and delicate balance (the former even being nerfed with epidemic chance and providing a defensive bonus to would-be attackers). As far as scale itself is concerned, though, bigger and more developed cities are definitely better than numerous small ones (let's not forget about that research penalty
), but if you're running slavery or serfdom, that can be a huge liability since the potential size of a revolt is just a randomized number between 1 and the population of the city in whose BFC it will spawn. (Also, for your reference on that, revolt risk itself is a flat 1% per city under slavery and 0.5% per city under serfdom.)
In practical terms, it's a fascinating dichotomy between farms and cottages when choosing how to develop your arable land before the late industrial and modern era swing it decisively in favor of the former. As engines of commerce, towns remain unparalleled for quite some time, and also entail a high sunk cost in needing to be developed over time, which both incentivizes building them early and disincentivizes destroying them over only a slight newly-gained edge. I've played probably at least a hundred games of RI and I still don't think I've quite gotten a grip on which is better overall, even though specific situations are more or less clear.
I could see that the farm, craftsman and town all exploded in usefulness in the late game (in the Civilopedia). I haven't done a full comparison in detail yet, but they seemed somewhat competitive. Of course depending on which civics you use. And a town of course doesn't provide a lot of hammers.
The revolts sound like they can be nasty. Do they attack your city or pillage?
I can imagine that you will use the switching between specialists heavily for getting the right Great Person for a certain Great Work that you need. And then hope that the RNG-god is on your side.
I think this is something that I can completely clarify for you. It is correct that the
chance for an epidemic is purely hypothetical (as in, a city with even an extremely high risk of an epidemic occurring still receives no actual malus to anything until one actually occurs), but obviously, the higher the likelihood, the more often they will actually occur and therefore incur real penalties on your empire.
When an epidemic actually does occur from the per turn percentage chance for each city that you can see the breakdown for, it does two things (which you actually can check in the Pedia, with the epidemic being listed as a building), with a 50% chance of ending every single turn, regardless of any other factors:
- Reduces the affected city's population by 1/turn only for cities that are above 4 population (which is the floor for population loss from epidemics).
- Inflicts a -25%
and -25%
penalty on the affected city,
regardless of its size.
Were it not for the floor described above, I think your suspicion would be entirely warranted as a potentially game-endingly bad consequence of a normal function of the RNG, but in practical terms (though probability mathematics still confuse me, honestly) I've never seen it take out more than a handful of population units in affected cities, and most often only 2 or 3. I suppose question "What are the odds of flipping tails 6 times in a row?" is one that objectively has an answer, but in practice it seems to be really low, as this is exactly how the mechanic functions and in hundreds of hours of play I've never seen one of my large cities reduced to a nub from an epidemic, and in the very early game it's only a somewhat concerning penalty on research and production.
Thanks a lot for this explanation. I didn't see the -25%
[/URL] and -25%
[/URL] thing under the epidemic building. I had not expected it to be under buildings. But it didn't hold all the information that you explained here.
Wow, these epidemics hit hard in cities above size 4. I will really want to avoid that. A few turns -25%
[/URL] and -25%
[/URL] in a small city is not so bad, but losing population hurts. A population still represents something like 100 food (depending on granary, city size, etc.) which you need to replace then... I understand that you can get a good food output a bit later in the game, but you´d rather not lose it all again ever so often.
You will lose 1 person, with 50% chance another, with 25% another, with 12.5% another... That infinite geometric sum converges to 2 (yeah, I'm a mathematician). So, on average, you will lose a bit under 2 persons, (but with significant outliers,) so some 200 food. That's a quite painful food loss. I will definitely combat this and likely don't want it to be above 1%... 1% already represent 2 food lost per turn on average. (Note, all rough, back of the envelop calculations here.) I didn't apply the losses due to the -25%
[/URL] and -25%
[/URL] here yet. In a big city, that can also amount to a decent amount. Although, I imagine that the really big late game cities have a epidemic chance of 0%.
Is there a Covid19 random event?
There are a few things that come to mind here for me.
1. The entire dynamic of "whipping" has been removed from the mod (except for a fringe case in the late game under forced labor, which Trashmunster was asking about) so you no longer can treat excess
as an input of reserve
, and every unit of
that isn't contributing to either growth or building settlers/workers or irregulars is strictly thrown out of the window. Since that was a vital function of high level play in the base game and a key means of staving off wasted yield, its removal poses a big paradigm shift in the whole Civ IV economy scheme of things, with its various means of conversion between different yields and the ratios for them. Epidemics are a means of rebalance. Early game cities with netting high
production but getting consistent epidemics will see themselves bouncing off of a soft ceiling and quickly growing back up to it (just as a high
yielding city in BtS would see itself consistently whipping and regrowing) instead of staying stagnated at a growth cap and wasting excess
.
I can see that happening indeed. I never really liked the 'whipping' mechanic that much, so I don't mind it being available only later in the game when you can already get production by other means. I could see a use for such a civic then, if you still have trouble with epidemics. Better to use the 'excess' food/population in that way. Sounds cruel, but just talking game mechanics here. But I bet, there are many competing civics that offer other benefits then.
2. Conversely to the base game, where excess unhappy population is an asset rather than a liability (there being no population-scaled revolts, revolutions, and ability to convert them to buildings or units immediately) epidemics are quite punishing, even if they seldom do more than hinder and slow you down in an acute sense. Therefore you have a pretty strong incentive to try to mitigate them. 12% is rather high (though, to be more or less expected in particularly squalid eras) and often you have the means to at least bring that down to something more modest, but of course at the cost of not doing something else you acutely need to be working towards.
Interesting choices to make. The core of a good 4X experience.
3. As far as it being hit predictably every 8 turns and needing quite the food surplus to regrow back to its natural cap, I don't think it usually works out to being this severe. As I mentioned above, epidemics in my case in core cities usually result in 1-3 population units lost. Sometimes it's more, but that is honestly pretty rare. By the time you have your farms spreading irrigation and the ability to build them without irrigation (especially if running serfdom),
tends to be rather abundant relative to
or
, meaning that oftentimes well-improved landscapes often have to avoid working all of their farms not to hit the ceiling and waste tile yield. In those situations, the cities having frequent epidemics seldom have trouble staying at or close to their population cap.
The example in the Manual seemed a bit extreme. Maybe just there to show the plusses and minuses. But I guess it can happen, especially just after constructing a building that increases epidemic chance. I will see how I deal with it. I will probably want to avoid using my food just to regrow back into a city size where I can't handle the epidemics. But I will have to play the game a bit to see. Thanks for all the help.
micromanagement.
- most likely for Walter:
- no I'm not kidding, Forts are important in my spinn-off) or canals 
, but also those kind of buildings, that we call converter-buildings
.
